ROYAL CITY — The Royal City City Council tentatively approved the city’s budget for 2023 at its meeting Tuesday evening.

The first part of the meeting was the last public hearing on the budget, city Finance Director Shilo Christensen said, although no members of the public turned up to comment on it.

“We're required to have so many public hearings before we adopt it,” Christensen said. “So this is our final public hearing. We can continue to talk about as much as we want, we just have to adopt it before the end of the year. So my assumption is, the first or second council meeting in December it will be adopted.”

The budget was still in draft form, Christensen told the council, because there were still things that would need to be adjusted. He drew attention to a few items he felt the council would want to know about, one of which was money allocated for parks and the golf course.

“Our contract, that's a multi-year contract, specifically says an amount of $5,000 (for the golf course),” Christensen said. “So we're able to amend that through an addendum for specific years if we want to, but we're not required to.”

Mayor Kent Anderson expressed misgivings about committing to a certain amount for parks with no certainty that matching state money would be forthcoming.

“It takes the state. You have to go through the whole legislative process to find out if we're going to get money for parks, and then we have the matching money for the park,” he said. “So, that being in limbo, you don't know if that was going to be zero. That's my biggest concern is you do both and then all of a sudden, you're taking a pretty big chunk of money out of the general fund.”

The other budget item Christensen spotlighted was the city’s accounting software. The city had been using a software called Bias, which was acquired by Portland-based Springbrook Software in 2020. With the buyout, Springbrook has announced there will be no further updates to Bias, Christensen said, and is pushing users to migrate to the newer software. The cost of renewal for 2023 is $7,400, Christensen said, as in past years.

“I think everything that's built into it will work fine,” he said. “But there's no more big updates. If we upgraded with them, 1t'd be an annual cost of $12,395, so about five grand more. But the first time we upgrade, you have to pay four grand to convert all your data to the new system. So it’s $16,000 to get the upgrade… So I just want to give you the heads-up. I don't see a reason to move (and pay) the extra five grand a year for something that’s gonna give me the same annual report and same payroll. Yyou know, everyone still gets paid. I think I can do that. I think that next year, I'll probably come back in and say, Okay, I think we have to upgrade.”

“So will the upgrade fee be more in the future, or do you think it’ll stay where it’s at?” asked Council Member Tiffany Workinger. “Will they do a Black Friday special?” she added with a laugh.

“I could ask,” Christensen answered. “When they told us they were bought out, and they wanted me to move up, they were quoting me around the same amount right now. So for the past two years, it hasn’t changed, but that doesn't mean the next year it won’t.”

“Then you have to do it, in 2024?” Workinger asked.

“Well, I guess it depends. There's a schedule called schedule six, that basically brings in all of my reconciliation and my software and my bank statements. And when I click a button in Springbrook, it does it for me; it tells me if there's errors, or if it tells me everything's perfect, we're good. So if there's a schedule like that that comes out, that's new this next year, then I'm going to have to manually do everything myself, which not might be impossible.”

Christensen also called the council’s attention to another software buyout that would affect the city.

“Municode is the company that hosts our ordinances online,” he said. “So if someone wants to know what the rule is, for dogs or whatever, they go online to do that. Municode was bought out by CivicPlus. They're not changing much when it comes to going online to view it, but they are changing their fee structure. We pay three separate things, a hosting fee of $900 a year, an admin fee of $225 a year, and then the updates are variable. So all the ordinances we passed in the year, I emailed them, and they told me, ‘OK, this is how much it's going to cost because this is how many pages it is.’ In 2021, the fee was $4,500, because we have a lot of pages in our ordinances that we're updating. With this new fee structure, the hosting fee stays the same at $900. However, the admin and updates they're combining to just a regular flat rate for most things. So instead of paying $1,300 in 2022, we'd have only paid $1,275. The asterisk is, if we have a large update, they charge a per-page and per-image fee. So that $4,520 would have been about the same because of how large it is.”

“I don't see an issue with it,” he continued. “Because it's not looking like it's going to cost us a whole lot more. It's actually looking like it might save us money in the long run, depending on our ordinances in the future. But (the CivicPlus representative) said, ‘This is not optional. It's not like you can keep the old version and not have updates.’ So what they're doing is they're running a promotion that if we sign before the end of this year, they'll give us a 20% discount on the first year.”

The council voted to approve the transfer to CivicPlus.

The final item at the meeting was the agreement between the city and the Royal School District regarding RCPD Officer Josh Bronn’s status as the district’s school resource officer. Because the SRO program started in November rather than at the first of the year, the terms of his service between the city and the district have been a little vague, Police Chief Rey Rodriguez said. Consequently, an addendum had to be drafted spelling out Bronn’s duties and limitations in the position. The addendum will be put before the Royal School Board at its next meeting Nov. 28, Christensen said. The council voted to approve the addendum contingent on approval or changes from City Attorney Katherine Kenison.

Joel Martin can be reached via email at jmartin@columbiabasinherald.com.